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Chernyakhiv culture is shown in orange, the third-century Wielbark Culture in red. Gotland is dark pink and the traditional extent of Götaland is in green. The Roman Empire is purple.

The Chernyakhiv culture (also known as Cherniakhov culture) (second century to fifth century) was a material culture, the distribution of which corresponded roughly to Ukraine and parts of Belarus. The term came from the site where the first burial ground of this culture was found, the village of Cherniakhiv in Ukraine's Kiev Oblast (Chernyakhov in Russian). Around the year 300, the same culture extended into Romania where, for political reasons, it is called the Sântana de Mureş culture. It is attested to in thousands of sites.

The archaeological record shows that the population of the Wielbark culture had settled in the area and mixed with the previous populations of the Zarubintsy culture. This cultural movement is widely accepted as the migration of the Goths from Gothiscandza to Oium, under the leadership of Filimer, of which the Goth scholar Jordanes wrote in the sixth century.

In the last decades of the second century, the Goths appear to have settled in Masovia, Podlachia and Volynia regions, but some of them moved to the area just north-west of the Black Sea.

A second wave of Germanic migrants arrived in the mid-third century, and most of them settled between the Dniester and the lower Dnieper, including the Cherniakhiv area.

Most of the population appears to have been Sarmatians who lived between the lower Danube and the Sea of Azov, as well as Slavs. In the west, there were some Dacians and Getae. The Sarmatians practiced inhumation while those deriving from the north, i.e., elements descended from the Zarubintsy culture, continued their urnfield practices.

In linguistic terms, it is said that this is the time and place where Slavic and Iranian borrowed lexical items from each other, and where Slavic picked up many of its Germanic loanwords. (Gothic, however, has few Slavic loanwords).

Archaeologists have found fibulas, combs and amulets showing contacts with not only Scandinavia, but also with Central Europe.

• James P. Mallory, "Chernoles Culture", Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.

• A Russian archaeology article